NY- Once, Judith Regan’s taste in men was Bernard Kerik. Now her taste in authors is O.J. Simpson. She was much better off on Kerik’s side of the law. To have a reputation decline faster than hers, you have to be on a bobsled run.

Soon, Regan publishes a new book from Simpson that is supposed to hint at how he might have stabbed two people to death, one of them his ex-wife. Regan also interviews Simpson next week on the Fox network. Regan says what she gets out of Simpson amounts to a “confession.” The truth is, she is the one who reveals herself. She was better off sneaking around with Kerik in the old days.

Oh, sure. You want to start understanding Regan? Start at a building known as Liberty View, at Battery Place and West Thames St., Battery Park City. It is a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, and apparently it was here, in those first months when the cleanup of Ground Zero had begun in 2001, when it wasn’t just toxic fumes in the air. It was love as well, between Kerik and Regan, frisky publishers.

Originally, some of the apartments at Liberty View were donated by the Milstein real estate people as places where rescue workers and Red Cross staffers could rest. Later, though, Kerik wanted to rent a two-bedroom apartment for himself. With good reason, now that we know what catnip he was to the ladies. If all the stories from that time are true, and nobody has ever denied them, Kerik was probably more tired than a whole downtown block of rescue workers.

Kerik – Rudy Giuliani’s hand-picked police commissioner and later a truly wretched nominee as Homeland Security director – was still police commissioner at the time, still married and living in Riverdale. In addition to those duties, he had Regan, who had published his best-selling autobiography, as a girl on the side, along with a female Correction Department officer.

“A very close relationship,” is the way Kerik described his relationship with Regan, back in the news now with another author who used to be somebody: O.J. Simpson.

We know all about him. There is nothing Simpson won’t do for attention or money. Now he writes this book for Regan called “If I Did It,” in which he is supposed to hypothetically tell how he would have stabbed his ex-wife Nicole along with a kid named Ron Goldman, who wandered into the dark alley that is Simpson’s brain one night in Brentwood, Calif., 12 years ago and ended up bleeding to death on the sidewalk along with Nicole Brown Simpson.

In those 12 years, during which O.J. was acquitted in his murder case but was hit big in a civil case filed by the Brown and Goldman families, he has revealed himself to be as dumb as the dumb cop he used to play in the “Naked Gun” movies.

You bet we know all about him. But know something else: He does not get back into play now, get a $3.5 million book deal and two hours of television time on the Fox Network — owned by the same company that owns ReganBooks – without help. The help comes from Judith Regan.

Once she held hands for real with Kerik. Now she takes the hand of O.J. Simpson and walks him back into the spotlight. As she does, here is the question for her and about her:

If she will do this, with a bottom feeder like O.J. Simpson, what won’t she do? If this isn’t her own bottom, then what is?

Of course Simpson was going to write a book like this someday, when he ran out of money, again. He’s sold everything else, including the Heisman Trophy he won at the University of Southern California as one of the great running backs of all time. You knew he would finally sell himself, some version of the real truth of that June night in 1994 when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman ended up dead at 875 South Bundy Drive. When he was ready to sell, Judith Regan was buying. You don’t talk about O.J. from now on without talking about her.

When Regan moved her business to California, she was quoted as saying she wanted to “bring a different idea of culture to Southern California.” Now here it is, with O.J. Simpson. You read back on her, an old article written about her in Vanity Fair by Judith Newman, and see a former employee at ReganBooks, Kristin Kiser, quoted as saying Regan considered herself an advocate for “women who have been victimized. She looks at it as a calling.”

You would think Nicole Brown Simpson would qualify in this area, dead of multiple stab wounds at 875 South Bundy Drive.

Regan has been a huge success in publishing for a long time, and not just with the kind of trash she gives us now, under the idiotic guise of getting a “confession” out of Simpson, as if anybody needed one. She has published everybody from Gen. Tommy Franks and Wally Lamb to Rush Limbaugh and Jenna Jameson, who wrote “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” for her. She once got hysterical because Monica Lewinsky took her book to another house. Maybe she was just offended that Lewinsky went into the room with Bill Clinton for nothing.

Regan is another, then, who will do anything to be rich and famous. In that way, maybe it is as inevitable that she would end up in a room with O.J. Simpson, doing this interview, as it was that she would hook up with Bernie Kerik at Liberty View.

It turns out Regan only thought she had reached Ground Zero in those days. Finally, with O.J., she makes it all the way.